Thunderbirds Are Go

Adapted from the TV series Thunderbirds, this 1966 British feature anticipated The Dark Crystal with its all-marionette cast. David Lane directed. Read more

Keepers Of The Frame

Despite a welcome attention to the brutal facts of celluloid deterioration, Mark McLaughlin’s 1999 documentary about film preservation, written with producer Randy Gitsch, is basically Movie Restoration 101, a fund-raiser with a lot of emphasis on the sociological and historical reasons for this activity and almost none at all on the aesthetic reasonsor the aesthetic issues raised by different kinds of restoration and/or revision of primary materials. The fact that the interview subjects include Forrest J. Ackerman, Alan Alda, Stan Brakhage, Herb Jeffries, Roddy McDowell, Leonard Maltin, and Debbie Reynolds, along with a few techies, archivists, and bureaucrats, gives a pretty good idea of the spread involved. But critical perspectives on film restoration are few and far between: the overall message is that it’s a good thing, even though we don’t get a clear position about how such an activity might be carried out well or badly. 70 min. (JR) Read more

Divine Trash

If this country were a more sensible place, John Waters would be hosting the Tonight Show. Barring such a possibility, Steve Yeager’s entertaining 1997 documentary about the making of Waters’s first midnight-movie hit, Pink Flamingos (1972), has the advantages of a proud Baltimore perspective and interviews with Jeanine Basinger, Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, J. Hoberman, Jim Jarmusch, the Kuchar brothers, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jonas Mekas, Paul Morrissey, the local film censor, countless cast and family members, and Waters himself. (As a closing title tartly points out, only Kenneth Anger and Russ Meyer declined to appear.) This affectionate piece of historiography snubs practically everything after Pink Flamingosincluding my two favorites, Female Trouble and Hairspraybut it’s so deliciously exhaustive about Waters’s humble beginnings that I can’t really complain. 105 min. (JR) Read more

Devil Ant

This video by former Golden Gloves boxer David the Rock Nelson sounds like an even lower-rent version of the guerrilla film produced in Bowfinger. Nelson captures famous individuals in publicincluding Hillary Clinton, Roger Corman, and Svengooliefor use in this impromptu monster flick, parts of which were shot in Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Pittsburgh. (JR) Read more

Secrets Of A Soul And Crisis

Two early films by G.W. Pabst. Sigmund Freud refused to have anything to do with Secrets of a Soul (1926, 97 min.), an early silent attempt to deal with psychoanalysis via German expressionism. The results are dated, but this is still an intriguing period piece. The 107-minute Crisis, made two years later, is said to be a relatively minor work, though it stars the memorable Brigitte Helm (the blind woman in Pabst’s previous film, The Love of Jeanne Ney) as a middle-class woman, ignored by her ambitious husband, who gets involved with bohemians. (JR) Read more

Negative Space And The Falconer: Videos By Chris Petit

Two aggressive, enjoyable, and highly original videos by Chris Petit, the English novelist and filmmaker (Radio On, Flight to Berlin). Both these portraits of somewhat legendary and cultish media figures were made for BBC TV, a much more enterprising purveyor of edgy television than anything found in this country. But otherwise the videos are quite different. The Falconer (1998, 56 min., codirected by Ian Sinclair) is the more eclectic and difficult of the two, a sort of pseudodocumentary about the countercultural English filmmaker (Daddy) and autodidact Peter Whitehead. Negative Space (1999, 39 min.) is about American film critic, painter, teacher, and carpenter Manny Farber (though American art critic Dave Hickey also appears, along with many film clips and western landscapes that are often glimpsed in Polaroid-framed split screens). Both videos are wild, thoughtful, invigorating, eye-filling, and unusually ambitious. Admission is free. (JR) Read more

South

Virtually all the works of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are worth seeing, and her 78-minute video documentary (1999) about Jasper, Texas, is no exception. But this meditation on the American south can’t be described as one of her finer efforts; so the implied link with From the East, one of her greatest films, is unfortunate. Akerman’s painterly instincts are as strong and rewarding as ever, but when she tries to move beyond them the results are often trite. Akerman’s theme was overtaken by a horrifying hate crime that occurred a few days before her arrival, in which a black man was beaten, chained to a truck, and dragged three miles to his death through a predominantly black neighborhood. Akerman interviews various locals about the incident (omitting her questions from the film), but apart from their defensiveness the responses are unilluminating. There’s a lovely shot moving through downtown Jasper at dusk, but on the whole Akerman seems to be floundering, unable to say or reveal anything fresh about the south. When she concludes with the camera moving down the three miles of road, there’s a disquieting clash between the beauty of the shot and the horror of what it signifies, but all she can do is bear mute witness to the crime. Read more

Set Me Free

Lea Pool’s sensitive coming-of-age feature (1999, 94 min.), set in and around Montreal in 1963, is apparently autobiographical in inspiration. The 13-year-old heroine (Karine Vanasse), who has her first period while visiting her grandmother in the opening sequence, is the illegitimate daughter of a struggling Jewish writer (Miki Manojlovic) and a Catholic who works as a seamstress to help support the family (Pascale Bussieres); her unlikely role model is the prostitute heroine played by Anna Karina in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and her sexual stirrings gravitate toward both her older brother and a female classmate, who also attract each other. Nicely acted and inflected, this is a very fresh piece of work. (JR) Read more

Gladiator

Russell Crowe stars as a Roman general asked by the dying emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), to take over as ruler. The emperor’s wrathful son (Joaquin Phoenix) promptly orders the execution of the general and his family; surviving as a gladiator, the general fights his way back to Rome to take revenge and restore justice in the Colosseum. Though the digital effects lack the weight and conviction of their equivalents in old Cecil B. De Mille movies, Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandal epic has some of the intensity of old Hollywood in terms of storytelling, spectacle, and violenceConnie Nielsen and Oliver Reed make especially strong contributions. But don’t expect anything as good as Spartacus or as enjoyably silly as Quo Vadis? The script, by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, is serviceable but not exactly inspired. 154 min. (JR) Read more